Rising: Local Natives

????Thomas Oxley Photography

The sound of L.A. five-piece Local Natives seems to take bits and pieces from several big indie bands: celestial harmonies and down-home charm from Fleet Foxes, sophisticated arrangements from Grizzly Bear, frenetic guitar work from Vampire Weekend, a general sense of warm communal bro-down from Animal Collective. They're a bunch of young dudes who have internalized ideas from indie contemporaries and art-pop forebears and used them to create their own joyous clatter.

Gorilla Manor, the band's debut album, is out now in the UK, and Frenchkiss will release it in the U.S. on February 16. Pitchfork recently caught up with singer/guitarist Taylor Rice and drummer Matt Frazier; our interview is below.

Pitchfork: How long have you been together as a band?

Taylor Rice: We started Local Natives a little over a year ago. There's three of us that sing all the time, and I've been buddies with those other two guys, Ryan [Hahn] and Kelcey [Ayer], since high school. So we've been together for a really long time. Our bass player and drummer both joined the band about three years ago. So as a group we've been together for a while. There came a point, maybe two years ago, where I graduated college and we decided to really go for it. We all moved in together and wrote a record, and then made the record. That's when we started the name Local Natives.

Pitchfork: Where does the name come from?

TR: Andy [Hamm], our bass player, came up with Local Natives. I feel that it conjures a type of image that fits the sound of our band. Our writing process is very collaborative, and as a live thing it just feels like a very communal type of musical endeavor. We just thought that it felt the vibe of the sound, that it finally coalesced for us.

Pitchfork: The album, Gorilla Manor, is named after the house where you guys all used to live. That's a pretty great name for a house.

TR: [Laughs] Yeah, we just felt like Gorilla Manor was a weird juxtaposition of words that really embodied the goings-on within the house, so it just felt right.

Pitchfork: Were there gorillas in the house?

TR: Almost, but not quite. We did the artwork for the album, and Matt [Frazier, drummer] made this poster of this insane food fight that we had at the house. The photo is just crazy. It's Matt slipping on water and peanut butter and sugar and flour. And he just Photoshopped it and messed around with it. We had this night of chaos that the house literally never recovered from. Everything in it was completely ruined.

Pitchfork: Did you get your security deposit back?

TR: We actually did not. [Laughs]Matt Frazier: I think we ended up owing money at the end of it. The landlady was super, super nice about it. I mean, way nicer than she should have been. We tried. We paid a professional cleaning service to come in, but it was literally just ruined.

Pitchfork: You cover the Talking Heads' "Warning Sign" on the album. Are you big fans?

TR: Definitely. Our rule on tour is that the driver gets to pick the music, but it's in there a good amount. When we originally started playing the song, we had no intention of actually recording it. We just wanted to play a cover song in our live set. Andy had been listening to More Songs About Buildings and Food a lot last summer, and he brought that song to the table. We started working on the harmonies and worked on the rhythm and kind of came up with this cool take on the song. We flipped it on its head, and it kind of became its own thing. It became such an integral part of our set that we ended up re-recording it and adding it to the album, and it's just stuck ever since.

Pitchfork: Any other big influences?

TR: With how collaborative our writing process is, you have to talk to everyone about their specific influences. As far as common threads, we've latched onto harmony and melody. We've all got some influence from 60s harmony bands that just have classic, amazing harmonies, like the Zombies or Crosby, Stills and Nash. There's also this rhythm element that we've all latched onto. Our keyboard player was a drummer first, and he does all of these integrated beats with Matt. We're all drawn to Animal Collective or Broken Social Scene; those might be some common threads.

Pitchfork: A couple of you have some pretty impressive mustaches. That's a bold decision.

TR: It's weird. I was always kind of told, "Dude, you should grow a mustache," but I'd never do it because I always thought they looked super awful. We did our first self-booked tour in January, a big month-long tour. A couple of us did this thing where we didn't shave for the tour. I didn't shave all tour, and then after a month, we were in Las Vegas. I said, "I'm going to shave off everything except for my mustache." I did it with no intention of keeping it, and some people were like, "Dude, you should rock the mustache." I haven't really looked back; I've kind of just gone with it.